5 Reasons to Ditch Your Scale, Even If You Want to Lose Weight

Let’s be honest, getting on the scale isn’t exactly a fun activity, and most of us would probably love an excuse to never get on one again. Being a personal trainer, you would probably expect me to be the one telling you to do it anyway – unless, of course, you actually know me or have read anything else I’ve written. So, without further ado, here are 5 valid excuses for never getting on another scale:

1. Focus on Habits, Not Results

Let’s get straight to the point… this isn’t about hiding from bad news, it’s about giving you a better chance to succeed. The honest truth is that we as a culture are obsessed with statistics and most people spend more time tracking results than creating results.

The more time and attention we put toward a specific stat, the easier it is to lose sight of the big picture and get sucked into quick-fixes that promise to improve the stat in question, even if it comes at the expense of things that should be more important (such as overall health). When you take this approach, especially with weight, the results are shallow at best and are practically guaranteed to be temporary because quick-fix shortcuts are not sustainable.

For any goal, whether it’s weight related or not, try to find 1-2 habits at a time that you know will put you on the right path and then have faith in the process. Setting a goal is like planting a seed – you will get better results by focusing on your watering habits than you will by constantly digging it up to check the progress. Just like the seed eventually breaking through the soil, your results will be clear to see if you just stick with the right habits.

2. Weight Loss is NOT a Math Equation

You may have heard the phrase that weight loss is all about “calories in vs. calories out”. Sounds nice and simple, right? The only problem is that it’s pure bullshit… pardon my French. Technically, it is true – but it leaves out more variables than you can possibly imagine, so following this as your approach to weight loss will leave you thoroughly frustrated when the numbers don’t seem to add up the way they should.

First off, this formula completely disregards the quality of the food you’re eating, which is astronomically more important than the quantity of food. When you eat the right foods, you don’t really have to monitor your intake or count calories. Our bodies were designed to tell us when to start and stop eating, we’ve just become accustomed to deceiving our bodies by giving them unnatural foods that trick our natural instincts.

Stress, hormones, muscle mass, and many other factors play a huge role in setting and adjusting your metabolism – and how you eat and exercise (both your body & mind) has an enormous impact on these adjustments. If you simply follow the calories in vs. calories out approach and eat too little food (and/or low quality food) and exercise too hard, the scale will encourage you to continue this method in the beginning and you’ll eventually destroy your metabolism and end up falling back to where you started (or worse).

3. Tracking Weight Can Be Misleading

Continuing on from #2, approaches like the “calories in vs. calories out” one can cause the scale to lead you astray. By tracking your weight, you could think that what you’re doing is working, when in reality it is actually leading you way off course. Let’s look at a simple example…

Imagine that you lost 5 pounds in your first week and are extremely excited about this progress. Unfortunately, 4 of the 5 pounds lost were muscle because you were in too great a calorie deficit (when you don’t eat enough, your body intentionally crashes your metabolism as a survival mechanism to be able to live on less food when food is hard to find).

Now, in just one week you’ve cut 200 calories off of your daily metabolic rate (on average, 1 pound of muscle burns 50 calories per day even without any activity). A few more weeks of this and you may no longer be able to lose weight, even with a low calorie diet. Then, when you eventually get frustrated and stop following the low calorie diet, your weight will balloon up because of your wimpy metabolism.

On the other hand, if you weren’t using a scale as your method of tracking progress, you would have been more likely to notice that after that first week you actually looked and felt worse, not better. In this way, the scale makes it harder to genuinely listen to your body, which is a much more accurate indicator of your progress.

4. The Scale Causes Stress, and Stress Causes Weight Gain

As mentioned in #2, stress is one of the other variables that impacts your metabolism (and obviously your overall health and well-being). Stepping on the scale is a very stressful activity for most people, and sometimes it can lead to the very opposite problem from the one we’ve talked about above. Rather than tricking you into thinking that you’re getting good results when you’re doing harm, it can also trick you into thinking that you’re getting poor results when you’re actually doing really well.

So instead of losing 5 pounds in the first week, what if you were to GAIN a pound? This must mean that what you’re doing is obviously not working, right? Not necessarily. Perhaps you actually lost 2 pounds of fat but gained 3 pounds of muscle, thus increasing your metabolism by 150 calories per day and setting you up to burn fat even faster going forward. This result is far better than the example of losing 5 pounds with 4 being muscle, but the scale might make you question your progress to the point that you either quit or change your approach.

Now, suddenly you’ve been sabotaged into abandoning a plan that was working really well – or at the least, you’ve planted a seed of doubt and created stress, which can also sabotage your results by throwing off your hormones even if you continue with your plan. As with the opposite example, if you had just paid attention to how you looked and felt, you would have noticed that you felt better after this productive week up until stepping on the scale and having your excitement crushed.

5. Weight-Control is Not the Goal, It’s a Side Effect of Health

Even if your scale monitoring does work and you end up losing weight, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was a success. This is very similar to a person who goes into a career because they are passionate about the field and love helping people, but over time becomes distracted by money. This person might end up being wildly successful from a financial standpoint, and yet miserable and lacking fulfillment because they stopped enjoying their work once they lost sight of why they started.

A number on a scale will never make you happier, so if this is all you are chasing then it will only lead to a neurotic, unhealthy obsession. So why do people want to lose (or gain) weight? Everyone is different, but it could be for confidence, the ability to keep up with your kids, to be capable of travel and an active lifestyle at an older age, or for any number of other reasons that have nothing to do with the number itself.

If you stay in touch with your own “why”, then you’re bound to achieve the result, but it doesn’t work both ways – just because you get the numerical result doesn’t mean that you will achieve, or even remember, your “why”. Keep your focus on what actually matters and is important to you, and enjoy your journey as your scale collects dust.